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spopepro writes "While un-captioned cats might be of limited interest to the /. community, I found this column on how a fabricated statistic takes on a life of its own interesting. Starting with the Humane Society of the United States' (HSUS) claim that the unsterilized offspring of a cat will '...result in 420,000 cats in 5 years,' the author looks at other erroneous numbers, where they came from and why they won't go away."

When I was a kid, I used to sit there smashing mosquitoes that bit me. Every time I smashed one fat with blood, I relished the idea that I had just killed a female mosquito who was about to lay thousands of eggs. And those mosquitoes would in turn breed and lay thousands of eggs and I had essentially just ended the lives of an infinite number of mosquitoes!

Please, just let me have this -- your environmental constraints and logical reasoning be damned!

That's pretty much TFA's point, and it's a scary one. Interest groups propogate faulty statistics so as to support questionable claims. Exaggeration, conflation, and the like does nothing more than undermine legitimate concerns. We've seen it with climate change - the desire to effect policy by presenting worst case scenario journalism has just fed the other side.
I remember when I got the "you're a guy so try not to rape everyone" speech in college. Good underlying point...concent is important, getting concent is complicated, sex under the influence is generally a bad idea. It was totally undermined by the 1-in-4 statistic, and the way in which it was presented, and ultimatly served to offend my friends and I while also instilling the seeds of anti-feminism (ooh those stupid fem-nazis and their crazy ideas....)in a bunch of guys. The stat is wrong, it's been shown to be lacking, and it's still repeated. It has significant utility and so it's not questioned but, ultimatly, it does more to harm a good cause than it does to support it.

For your future knowledge, it is 1-in-5 not 1-in-4. I would consider those to be almost the same.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00049859.htm [cdc.gov]
"Female students (20.4%) were significantly more likely than male students (3.9%) to report they had ever been forced to have sexual intercourse."

Which is somewhat my point. We were specifically told that 1 in 4 women would be raped on campus. Not 1 in 5 in her lifetime. Not with all the significant caveats and modifiers that precede the numbers at the CDC you've referenced (the 1995 numbers).
Check out the 2007 numbers [cdc.gov] - it’s now 20 to 25% either attempted or completed. The Institute of Justice found that [usdoj.gov]

A survey of college women found that 2.8 percent had experienced either a completed (1.7 percent) or an attempted (1.1 percent) rape within a 9-month timeframe.
13.7% of undergraduate women had been victims of at least one completed sexual assault since entering college: 4.7% were victims of physically forced sexual assault; 7.8% of women were sexually assaulted when they were incapacitated after voluntarily consuming drugs, alcohol or both; and 0.6% were sexually assaulted when they were incapacitated after having been given a drug without their knowledge
Finally, a national-level study of college and community based women found that approximately 673,000 of nearly 6 million current college women (11.5 percent) have ever been raped, and approximately twelve percent of these rapes were reported to law enforcement

I'm not questioning the underlying idea that rape is pervasive and wrong. What I'm getting at is that by dragging out exaggerated, faulty numbers you introduce weakness into an argument. Those men in that room would have been horrified to hear that 13.7% of women had been sexually assaulted on campus - but that numbers not sexy enough for widespread hyperbole. All it took was for one guy to do a little digging into the stats, find the body of literature that criticized the methodology of that one source, and campus rape became a joke to half the community. Instead of disgust we had widespread disdain for the claim itself, and that is extremely damaging.

There is something extremely patronising, or condescending, which presumes that people cannot be motivated by subtle or nuanced arguments – every problem doesn’t have to directly affect 98.43% of the population to count.

I wonder if part of it was almost like a sense of relief to find out it wasn't 25%, but more like 13%? While that's still horrendous (as you point out) it's lower, and therefore sounds much better, almost like the actual rate had dropped by half, when the first number was just bullshit.

... Especially given that a number of women still do the "no means yes" game for testing mates.

Such a thing doesn't exist. Pretending it does is just perpetuating the rape culture embedded in our society. If someone says no, you leave. If that isn't what they wanted, that is their fault for not being clear. But my guess is that the vast majority of the time it is what they wanted. Pretending that there are in fact many women out their just that'll "tell you no but mean yes" is sexist bullshit that should have died out in the 20's. If someone is "saying no while meaning yes" (and I doubt they are), th

If you actually have to force someone to have sex with you, you're raping them. If they actually wanted this to occur, the intention would be unmistakably clear.

Oh, nonsense. I've been told by several women, usually several years after the fact, that I'd disappointed them by ignoring their offers of sex. Fact was that they'd just been a bit too subtle for my simple mind. Maybe their intention was unmistakably clear to someone else, but it wasn't to me.

You are propagating a sexist, nonsensical worldview that is very dangerous. If your story is true, than the females should have been more forward. End of discussion. You acted correctly in "ignoring" their "offer" of sex. Both sides should make it completely clear what they want. If there is -any- room for misunderstanding, you haven't been clear enough. The idea that women are or should be "subtle" with their offers is sexist bullshit that is one of the leading causes of our rape culture. You acted correct

"No" means "no", you dope. There's a difference between being coy -- a very strict and limited set of behaviours, which are flagrantly obvious as such -- and resisting somebody's advances. Are you unable to grasp this? If you actually have to force someone to have sex with you, you're raping them. If they actually wanted this to occur, the intention would be unmistakably clear.

Ah great a unicorn believer. Last I heard, the dating/mating game frequently isn't like that. And that 20% "forced sex" study includes women who chose to have sex even though they didn't want to. That group doesn't count as "rape" in my book.

Rape culture is the idea that our culture minimizes the damage of rape, marginalizes rape victims, blames the victims for being raped, and gives rapists the idea that they can safely get away with rape. The phrase, regrettably, is frequently wielded as a blunt weapon to silence criticism and stifle critical thinking. One might even end up with the idea that it's an inherently wrong idea, that we in no way have a rape culture. I'll admit, it's easy to think that when you see the phrase abused.

The problem with the "lies, damned lies, and statistics" argument is that it leads people to conclude that all statistics are invalid unless they happen to agree with our political proclivities, which is far more dangerous than bad numbers floating around out there.

You see the nice thing about statistics is that when someone fudges something, it's possible to prove that something was fudged. However if you have been trained to reject all statistical evidence, you no longer have any reasonable tools for sepa

When I was a kid, I used to sit there smashing mosquitoes that bit me. Every time I smashed one fat with blood, I relished the idea that I had just killed a female mosquito who was about to lay thousands of eggs. And those mosquitoes would in turn breed and lay thousands of eggs and I had essentially just ended the lives of an infinite number of mosquitoes!

Please, just let me have this -- your environmental constraints and logical reasoning be damned!

I had a friend who would clench his muscle until the mosquito was getting ready to disengage, and then would release. The resulting increase in blood flow would explode the mosquito quite nicely. Never was successful in the timing myself.

If one cat turns into 420000 over 5 years, then if a single cat was abandoned or escaped 15 years ago in the USA, there should now be 13.8 quadrillion offspring accumulated, or 13.8 Peta-cats if you will. Let's say that "just" one Peta-cat is still alive. That's 3.2 Mega-cats per capita, or a bit over 100 cats per square meter of american territory.

With all the fucking bullshit that ends up on the front page. All the iPhone astroturfing, all the Android FUD, all the iPhone FUD and Android astroturfing, all the dupes and tripes and all the dopes. All the ridiculous "Ask Slashdot"s that could have been solved with 2 minutes Googling...

This ends up in idle? Mis-reporting of unsubstantiated facts by news-outlets may not be news, but it's stuff that matters, and if ever there was an example of something that shouldn't have been consigned to the idle bin, this is it! Adding some stupid allusion to lolcats does not make it idle-worthy. If someone submitted a story about the pope dying and added "His hat looks a bit like a wang! LOL" does it follow that the story should go on the Funny Pages?

Well, TFA is an amusing read, but it's hardly news.... It's not like we don't all know this is going on all around us. I guess it's a high quality article for Idle, but it'd be a pretty low quality news story...

I don't know what kind of maths they do in the Wall St Journal (yeah, I actually RTFA), but according to the maths that I do from the unfashionable side of my mother's basement, the actual
number of
offspring after 5 years starting with a single unspayed female cat is zero.

Now, if one starts with two cats however, the number could well be higher...

Yeah, I got a question like that on a test in high school once... we were given a fictional creature (one, either female or unspecified gender), and the rate at which they reproduce, and told to find how many creatures there would be after so much time.
I puzzled over whether the answer was "one" or whatever the math worked out to, because it was fictional and there was no indication of whether the creature reproduced sexually, asexually, or whatever. Turned out, the answer was, sure enough, one.

I don't know what kind of maths they do in the Wall St Journal (yeah, I actually RTFA), but according to the maths that I do from the unfashionable side of my mother's basement, the actual number of offspring after 5 years starting with a single unspayed female cat is zero.

Now, if one starts with two cats however, the number could well be higher...

They never (and can't) account for population restrictions. That could include...

Food supply. If there are too many cats, not enough food, some cats die of starvation. There are an abundance of natural controls at work there. Malnurished animals don't tend to reproduce very well. But, if there is a good food supply (rodents, birds, snakes, etc), they will reproduce more.

Natural mistakes. Not every animal is born perfectly. Some are stillborn. Some die at only a few days or weeks old due to health problems.

Illnesses. Sick animals without treatment have a lower chance of survival.

Predators. A bunch of warm fuzzy kittens running around make good snacks for birds of prey. Well, also for foxes, coyotes, snakes, alligators, etc, etc, etc. Sometimes it doesn't have to be a predator that can actually eat it. I had a cat who was bitten twice by poisonous snakes. She could have died without medical assistance. Since she was a pet, she had readily available food and water. The same can't be said for feral animals.

And of course we have to mention human influences. People taking feral cats out of the population to make fixed house pets out of them. Some may be trapped and sent off to the pound and subsequently euthanized. Others are killed through accidents, such as catastrophic intersections between the animal and vehicle vectors (i.e., run over).

There are plenty of statistics on the likelihood of a feral animal surviving to maturity. That varies tremendously by their local environment. A stray cat in a suburban neighborhood may live very happily, as there are not many natural predators around (except humans). They'll also likely have access to food and water left outside for pets. A stray cat in a wooded area will have less of a chance. Sometimes the distance between the two is only a few miles.As with the statistics in the article, you cannot blindly assume either set of statistics is correct.

I love statistics. They can be used to prove or disprove anything, and you can usually find statistics to argue both sides of the same issue. The statistics can be dramatically swayed by who paid for the study to be done.

Illnesses. Sick animals without treatment have a lower chance of survival.

FIV. It is rampant in feral cat colonies. It has also mutated so that there are strains unique to specific areas and/or colonies.
Unlike HIV it spreads via bites and scratches btw.

I worked with a PhD student doing research on a specific strain of FIV unique to the country I live in - you should've seen some of the feral monsters she dissected. Size of frikkin' horses with fangs that would make Dracula jealous.

Wrong continent? Invisible moose? No chupacabra? Now I'm curious. I thought the chupacabra had spread all around the world, but they're still good at hiding themselves. Maybe they use the same technique the invisible moose use.:)

They never (and can't) account for population restrictions. That could include...

Food supply. If there are too many cats, not enough food, some cats die of starvation.

That's a nice textbook analysis of natural limits to population.

But you are totally ignoring the reality of a very specific situation - feral cats in urban areas. What exactly is the natural control at work? Cats are wary, not many are killed by accidents. There is abundant food in an urban environment thanks to dumpsters. Furthermore, cats are great natural predators and left unchecked will decimate a bird population. You seriously think "birds of prey" in a modern city are enough to do ANYTHING to a feral cat population? If you don't care about any other wildlife then ignoring wild cat populations is a great way to see most of it decline.

People taking feral cats out of the population to make fixed house pets out of them.

A really feral cat CANNOT be made a pet. If you get them really, really early as kittens (a few weeks old) you can, but after that - forget it.

Not to mention shelters have to kill plenty of cats that are not feral to begin with, because there aren't even enough people to take cats simply abandoned...

The truth is more of a range but the reality is on the high end of the range, in any modern city. The groups posting these figures may be giving you a number somewhat too high but they are not as far off as you and other people thinking of statistics in simple terms seem to think.

The best solution is to trap cats, spay/neuter, and then release them. This keeps cat populations at a much lower natural limit, as the cats will still keep other cats out of a territorial area but cannot produce new kittens that keep a colony growing and then go out to form new colonies.

But you are totally ignoring the reality of a very specific situation - feral cats in urban areas. What exactly is the natural control at work?

With urban sprawl, "urban" or "suburban" areas have grown into what was wild natural areas. At one house I lived in, I was talking to people who had lived there since the community was built. 15 years prior, it wasn't uncommon to see wild foxes or otters. The area was almost infested with large snakes. When I moved in, the first day I saw an osprey

Exactly. You can get a feral cat to take food from you but it's never going to be a pet. It's not logical to claim the feral cat population will decline because of adoption, when there are many perfectly ready cats already available for adoption at any given moment in time.

And that was in a rural area, where easy access to food is harder to come by - in an urban or city environment a cat really doesn't need your handouts as much, because there is so much garb

The cats that we domesticated were comfortable laying around the house (the porch was enclosed, but the doors were left open).

I never said we domesticated them to make them pets. There were a few reasons. The most "friendly" was that we could then get them fixed. The real reason though was so we didn't have wild animals fighting with our domesticated animals.

The argument wasn't for or against adoption. The statistic counts an unf

The latest thinking on the tributes is that they aren't gifts for the alpha cat. Some big cats and a lot of the smaller ones are storage predators, they haul the carcass somewhere safe to eat. Leopards pull them up trees, cougars often take them back to dens etc. Fluffy is just taking his mouse to a safe territory where no other cat can get it. Nice to think they think your house is safe.

With cats that I've had, I've noticed a few different behaviors with food, including kills. I've had a lot of cats over the years, and have paid attention to their behaviors. These are some general categories of their behaviors with food.

1) Pet food. They usually don't care much, but it's food so they eat it. They'll fight a little with each other when they're eating (growling, and the occasional paw smack), but they aren't very interested in protecting it.

But you are totally ignoring the reality of a very specific situation - feral cats in urban areas. What exactly is the natural control at work? Cats are wary, not many are killed by accidents. There is abundant food in an urban environment thanks to dumpsters. Furthermore, cats are great natural predators and left unchecked will decimate a bird population.

Starvation is definitely a limiting factor, at least in suburban areas. My mom's neighborhood has seen an increase in stray cats since the housing bust.

But what about those neighborhoods that are so tough the squirrels have Uzis?

More seriously, it's not that feral cats are no problem or that it's a problem to just ignore. It's that it isn't as outrageously bad as the stats that are being claimed. Making ludicrously wild claims that simple logic will negate may get some attention initially, but in the long run it will damage your cause a lot more than it will help it..

Real world example of self-limiting cat populations: Barn cats. Maybe the number quoted is theoretically possible, but if this were as much of a problem as the statistic implies, we'd have been buried in cats long ago.

A friend of mine had "barn cats" They were mostly domesticated, but not fixed. You could get close, and if they were curious, they'd let you touch them. They lived in the barn, and were perfectly happy catching mice. They were never fed, but were still healthy and happy. The population was about 3. One of them had a litter of kittens, and the population went up to about 7, but dwindled down on it's own to 4, which then became 3 when one of

I agree that your numbers are probably closer to reality, but I think the minimum should still stand at 1, or even 0. The survival rates of feral cats are probably good, but they're not perfect. Also, the breeding availability of feral cats is more limited than you assume due to competition for territory, mates and resources. Also, parasites and spoiled food are two large contributors to weakened feral animals and inability to reproduce.

Also, the breeding availability of feral cats is more limited than you assume

I don't think they are - my numbers assume only that the cats get pregnant, not from who. That is going to happen regardless of territory issues, and there will always be mates... I did lower the number of litters to 3 to account for some variance in how often a female cat could get pregnant.

Also, parasites and spoiled food are two large contributors to weakened feral animals and inability to reproduce.

Those are the questions that drove Peter J. Wolf to create Vox Felina, a blog dedicated to examining the basis of claims made about cat numbers and behavior, and debunking those that don't withstand scrutiny.

I believe this is some sort of conspiracy.

Also:

Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment... like the body or the subject!)

The sexy meme will propagate much faster than the rational one!How do you get people to listen to the rational answer--especially when the rational answer is "Don't make decisions based on that--I don't know it and neither do you. You're a hazard to all of us while you're flying blind!"

Actually, if you actually read the article to the end, they do say it applies to just about any kind of statistics. E.g., an example they use is a statistics which supposedly said that men prefer dating secretaries than female managers -- and you can see how that helped fuel that prejudice that women who pursue a that kind of career won't get laid, and probably are cold hearted bitches who don't have time for love anyway -- but then when someone actually got to the bottom of it, the poll didn't actually ask that.

Or you can take the myth that a woman who's not married by 35 is even less likely to marry than to be killed by a terrorist. Not only it turns out it was BS unsubstantiated hyperbole, but the perpetrators actually eventually apologized for it. Hey, better a few decades later than never, right? To get an idea how bogus that was, not only didn't the calculated numbers add up to "less likely than being killed by a terrorist" (they even admitted they made that up for sensationalism sake), but it was based on the critically flawed assumption that a woman would _only_ marry older men. But it's been echoed all over the place and taken for a fact.

And what they say is that basically not only some numbers pulled out of some PR bullshitter's ass get taken for gospel, but basically they become nearly impossible to debunk. You'd have to spend the equivalent of several episodes to debunk one sound bite that takes just 5 seconds to mindlessly repeat all around. And even then, you won't get as much exposure as the mass of idiots repeating the falsehood because they heard it somewhere, and even to a lot of those who hear you debunking it, you'll just sound like some conspiracy-theorist for attacking what they know for a fact.

And I think that shouldn't be dismissed as just some idle lolcat joke. Especially in IT and CS, we see the same phenomenon every day. There are a ton of "X is better than Y" or "A is 10% more scalable than B" pseudo-facts thrown around, that everyone just repeats and nobody questions them.

Especially almost nobody in management who heard it in some IT-for-managers ragazine _and_ from the nice salesman using it to sell his snake oil. So it must be true, right?

Though IMHO it is a bit more than that. It's not just that people will believe some BS or another. It's that one piece of BS can get so circulated around, that it becomes basically common knowledge. It becomes something that "everyone knows". Even people who wouldn't just believe it the first time, start falling for it when they hear it from 10 different sources as common knowledge.

Plus, as they say in TFA, eventually it even gets picked by some newspaper, or repeated by some politician trying to support some bill, and it kinda becomes official.

Even basically "[citation needed]" doesn't help there, because some piece of BS (with statistics or not) that's been bouncing around for 30 years, can be a bitch to track to the actual source. Publication A cites official report B (see the politicians using them above,) which in turn has a footnote pointing at newspaper article C, which points to out-of-print book D, which even if you find a copy and read it, in turn points out to some study that's behind a paywall, and if you got even there, you find out it's really a meta-study quoting the numbers published in yet another article E.

Most people will give up somewhere along that chain, and assume it's actually a valid and proven claim. Some right at the first step, because, hey, it does point to a source.

And sometimes even if you make it all the way to the root source, you'll have trouble convincing anyone that that common knowledge is false. I mean, hey, what are you, some conspiracy theorist? Everyone knows X is true. Plus, supposedly some scientist said that (though usually he actually didn't, and some PR department or journalist mis-represented him), and who are you to question scientists??? You can even see that kind of idiot on Slashdot. There are several people around who seem to thrive on posting basically "who are you to question TEH SCIENTISTS???"

And even if you got past that, you often find that

A) they have the same gross misunderstanding of statistics as the journalists who mis-represented it in the first place, so good luck getting them to see why it doesn't actually say that, or

B) you need to first teach them what an equivocation or amphibology fallacy is, before they're even equipped to understand why the study doesn't actually say what they think it says

C) you'd need to first teach them a lot about the psychology and pitfalls of polling, i.e., that basically you can produce vastly different results from the same people and to essentially the same question, by just exploiting the tendency of people to say "yes" more than "no", or pick the answer which sounds more agreeable, or just pick the first one more in multi-choice polls. Serious polling companies know and compensate for that, but a PR agency can deliberately exploit that to skew the results.

Etc.

And again, try to do that without sounding like a CT-er inventing reasons not to trust those guys, and without falling into "tl;dr" range either. Good luck with that.

Basically at some point some falsehoods have taken off so well, that you don't even have to be a gullible moron to just take them for granted.

I ran into this a while ago, when I read on slashdot somebody claiming that hemp had a far greater percentage of fiber than any other crop. Turns out it doesn't, it's right in line with cotton and other crops, but an incorrect number that was published in one magazine article in the 50's has been circulating ever since. Since the number errored on the HIGH side, it became a 'useful' number, and so gets constantly repeated.
I'm confident that the person I corrected continued using the incorrect number, ev

Exactly - and some bogus claims just feel too true to be false. For example, there's that idea doing the rounds that the Superbowl leads to a spike in domestic violence. It's just not true - the Washingdon Post even managed to track down where the falsehood originated, and there's a very informative Snopes entry [snopes.com] on the topic. Yet it lives on and on and on because it feels right somehow - the Superbowl is a very violent, aggressive, and above all male event. Some proponents even suggest that anyone challengi [feministing.com]

Can you at least agree that the environment needs some protection? I don't think people want lead in their water, asbestos in their homes or acid rain in their cities. The environment needs more protection than it currently has. Effectively shitting all over your home is not a wise decision, closing your eyes doesn't make it stink any less.

"The question they asked was not whether men would rather date bosses or secretaries," she [Pulitzer-prize winning science writer Deborah Blum] told me. "It was whether they'd be more attracted to a women who could tell you if you could go to the bathroom or not, or a women who brought you coffee."

I should derive a bullshit statistic on how many Pulitzer prize winners don't know the difference between the plural "women" and the singular "woman", though I'm pretty sure it is Christie Keith's own error in fai

Oh, drug policy is the proverbial low hanging fruit there. I only mentioned IT and CS because we're on Slashdot, but, yeah, if we're doing a top of domains where it happens the most, I'll have to admit that drug-related politics would be way up there.

Basically. Though you need to put some number or hyperbole comparison on it, and make it a short and catchy sound bite for best results.

Sort of how like in the article it wasn't just "cats sometimes have more kittens" or "cats kill a lot of birds" that got to be circulated into near impossible to debunk, but catchier stuff with numbers, like "an unspayed cat can produce 42,000 cats in 5 years" or "a cat can kill a billion birds". Sounds more scientific that way. It practically implies that you have a scient

"Sort of how like in the article it wasn't just "cats sometimes have more kittens" or "cats kill a lot of birds" that got to be circulated into near impossible to debunk, but catchier stuff with numbers, like "an unspayed cat can produce 42,000 cats in 5 years" or "a cat can kill a billion birds". Sounds more scientific that way. It practically implies that you have a scientific study somewhere that backs it up to within one significant digit."

an unspayed cat can produce 42,000 cats in 5 yearsI think I can see where a number like that came from. Under ideal conditions I suspect you could breed a heck of a lot of cats from a single female ancestor in 5 years.

Lets assume that a cat can get pregnant after it's 0.75 years old (what i've read online says 6-9 months), that pregancy takes a quater of a year (seems to be an overestimate) and that each litter produces four kittens (the soruce i've read says 3-6 is normal)two of which are female (guess). F

To me, a.sig/quotation is not a bumper sticker. It's a quote and a quote is a quote is a quote. Nothing more. Sorry to hear you feel otherwise. I'd have used more text, but the.sig field is limited. And, yes, it does matter. If you do not know the context, then you do not understand the quotation.

I think the case can be made that people who accept sensationalist statistics without sufficient media literacy to understand the various biases involved in poorly conducted studies may, in fact, be only using 10% of their brain.